Saturday, July 12, 2014

Mecha Musings: "Two Inch Terrors"

For the last few years, I've been making mechs along a particular pattern. I have come to call them (you guessed it) "Two Inch Terrors."

It wasn't deliberate, at first. I (and my clients) kinda fell into it.

Eventually, things worked out so that a lot of my little armored
nightmared ended up around two inches tall (approximately 16.6 feet or 5 meters tall,
or so, in 1/100 scale), and with a number of weapons and attachments
that had a common dimension.

A mech or mecha that is about the aforementioned size could carry a pretty heavy weapons loadout, have decent armor, mobility, and still duck behind a house or under a highway overpass to take cover from incoming fire.

That ball and socket arrangement is pretty easy to reverse-engineer, but in case you want some specific numbers, here's a small spec sheet.

Here's some of the bits from Critical Mass Games that are also compatible with the same 1/8" mounting system. Everything won't be sized in the same proportions, but you have a lot of options from which to choose. For a blog post of mine detailing more, click here.

Then, use the dremel bit to make a matching cavity in the intended hardpoint "female" surface. A small bit of extra dremelling may be necessary to form enough clearance for the ball bearing and some glue to fit in the cavity.